Blacktail Deer Plateau Flawless

He took her smile as permission and he stepped forward, then swiftly but gently slung his belly to the earthen floor to put himself at the same level as his family. When Hawkeye spoke, his eyes met hers wonderingly and then he looked down at the two puppies again. "My girls," he murmured happily. If he was disappointed that their prediction of a son hadn't come true, Peregrine himself didn't even know it.

Now that he was closer to them, he could see the slight differences. The pup Hawkeye called Tytonidae was slightly paler than her sister, who was black as the deepest, darkest night. "What's that?" the new father blurted, reaching out his nose to touch the darker pup. She'd squirmed onto her back, exposing patches of white fur beneath each of her four short, shapeless legs. "She has white armpits," Peregrine marveled before a deep chuckling noise burst from his throat. "And Ty has a patch on her chest," he observed aloud, still chortling.

He sat there for a while, very quiet and still, simply watching the puppies suckle and squirm. Eventually, his eyes lifted to Hawkeye's face and he smiled at her with fierce adoration written on every plane of his face. "I love you," he told her, "and you and you," he added for the pups' sake, even if they couldn't hear him. "Daughters. I have daughters."

Peregrine suddenly exchanged a look with his mate, then leaped onto all fours. Wordlessly, he slipped from the den, strode a dozen yards away from its mouth so as not to disturb his new family, then threw back his head. "I HAVE DAUGHTERS!" he veritably roared into the sky, his powerful howl resonating across the plateau and into the lands beyond it. "Hawkeye and I are happy to announce the birth of our little girls, Tytonidae and Osprey Jr!" he added a bit more formally.

The Alpha male's head dropped and he hastily trotted back to the den. "We'll probably have visitors. I can tell them to stay back if you like," he murmured to Hawkeye, his tongue bathing her face in kisses before he settled down next to her, positioning his body so that the two of them surrounded their newborn pups like two dark crescent moons.